To fully understand the challenge of
redesigning the NC State home page, it is first useful to note that
various projects, committees, and organizational units at NC State talked
about, met, and sometimes even worked on redesigns as far back as 1995
(see Building
the NCSU electronic door: a brief history). So the February, 2001,
release of the first redesign of the NC State home page was
long overdue, given that many prospective college students complained
that, on average, university and college websites didn't provide the
information they need [Gueverra, J. (2001, June). How
Are Dot Edu's Using the Internet? The Technology Source].

The latest redesign of the NC State
website comes one-and-a-half years later and draws on the strengths
of the existing home page while simultaneously addressing the shortcomings
of the design. The greatest improvements to the current NC State home
page are the new home page's

3) Links placed across audience categories:
Placing content in more than one category (e.g., links exist that both
future students and current students would find useful) [Rosenfeld,
L., & Morville, P. (1998). Information Architecture for the World Wide
Web. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly & Associates].

6) University address prominently displayed:
Serves as an anchor element at the bottom of the page and gives users
information important for contacting the university.

7) 2nd tier designed in multi-column
format to reduce scrolling dramatically: Users are now able to see all
of the sub-categories at a glance and scrolling is reduced to a single
sccreen [strongly recommended by Nielsen, 2001].

8) Media available but not intrusive:
video and photography on the 2nd tier make this level of information
more interesting. All video is brief, with an option of using either
Quicktime or RealMedia software.

10)
Usability methods built into our design process from
the beginning: we have continued to perform competitive
analyses of peer and private university home pages,
built heuristic evaluations into every development cycle,
and integrated usability and focus group feedback into
our design efforts at every stage [Nielsen, J., & Mack,
R. L. (Eds.). (1994). Usability Inspection Methods.
NY, NY: John Wiley & Sons]. When users send us feedback
via homepage_feeback
we respond and revise the NC State website according
to their user preferences.